Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [59]
“Why kill myself when I can get a new life with my land? We have all decided this—we realized that selling it all is the best way to get off the land forever,” Chandrashekhar Dorlikar, 41, told me as he opened the village’s handwritten account books. His moustache and beard were neatly trimmed, his clothes frayed; he was one of the few literate people in the village. He believed the fields and buildings could be bought by India’s largest company, Tata Group, the Mumbai-based industrial conglomerate, for perhaps 20 million rupees ($400,000) or $10,000 per family—a vast amount of money for these families and almost certainly a completely unrealistic expectation. In earlier years, up to the end of the 1990s, each family here might have earned $2 a day, but, in the decade that followed, their household balances turned negative. Like peasant villagers in poor districts around the world, people here are choking on debt. Families typically owe banks and private lenders $500 each, close to a year’s income. And the debt keeps mounting.
“We had in mind that if somebody buys it, we’d go into some urban area and take up trades,” Chandrashekhar told me. “Even a rickshaw driver in an urban area makes enough that his kid can go to a convent school and he can cook on a gas burner. Here, we have to go to the village school and our wives cook on an open fire. So we’d use the money to move to urban areas where at least it would be better. On farming, we can’t educate our children. The most education any of our children have is primary school. To go further we’d have to rent a room in town, pay for transportation and books—too expensive. We have spent the past 20 years living on hope, every year praying that we will get a good crop. We don’t want to be dead—we’d rather be living in a slum.”
That dichotomy is no mere metaphor, for aside from selling the entire village, or some major body part (as people in other villages have attempted), the only other popular way out of the rural trap in this region is a strategic death. At the very end of the twentieth century, farmers across the Vidarbha region (Dorli is near its center), deranged by crop failure and rising debt, weary of watching their families wither from malnourishment, discovered a strategy that could stave off the ruination of their families. There are few instruments of death on a poor Indian cotton farm: Sowing and plowing and harvesting are done, exhaustingly, by hand, and even sharp blades are scarce. The men here choose to wait until the early evening and head out into their fields, where they sit on the ground, survey the parched and lifeless soil around them, and drink a liter of agricultural pesticide.
This practice soon became epidemic. Between 1995 and 2004, according to a study conducted by the Mumbai economist Srijit Mishra, the suicide rate for poor male farmers in Maharashtra state nearly quadrupled, from 15 per 100,000 to more than 57, while for equally poor non-farm-owning laborers it rose only from 17 to 20 (for women it fell from 14 to 11). In some of the districts that surround Dorli, that rate has risen as high as 116, more than eight times the national rate for males. There is no indication that these numbers have since decreased. In 87 percent of cases, according to Mishra, the suicide victims were indebted, and the average debts are similar to a good year’s income for a small farm. And, tellingly, in 79 percent of cases, the suicides were committed